Meet The ‘Man’ Who Crashed Bitcoin In 2018

Bitcoin’s Tokyo Whale (not to be confused with that Tokyo Whale) revealed on Wednesday that he has sold off about $400 million in bitcoin and bitcoin cash since late September.

Nobuaki Kobayashi, bankruptcy trustee for Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world before hackers absconded with tens of thousands of customers’ bitcoins worth billions at recent prices, said he started selling in late September, meaning it’s quite possible he sold at least some of the coins at the highs reached toward the end of last year.

Kobayashi made his disclosure in the report from the 10th creditors’ meeting, which took place Wednesday.

In the report, he said he’d started selling off the bitcoin and bitcoin cash to raise money for disbursements that the trustee will soon need to begin making as bankruptcy claims are being evaluated, per Bloomberg.

Which brings us to the crash of Bitcoin from December 2017 through February 2018.

Matt Odell (@Matt_Odell) presents the full list of transfers out of their wallet.

h/t @alistairmilne

As Odell points out “More than half of the bitcoin they sold (18k btc) was transferred to an exchange on Feb 5th. The day before bitcoin hit its 3 month low of ~$6000. They panicked and sold the bottom. Market absorbed it well.”

This is what Kobayashi’s “sells” look like on the chart of Bitcoin…

Odell explains “The arrows on the chart above mark the dates of each Gox wallet transfer. Worth noting, these aren’t the dates of the sales, those most likely happened right after, these are the dates of the transfers to the exchange.“

So that explains – or reveals – the mysterious man on the offer-side of Bitcoin for two months.

Still, Bloomberg reports that Kobayashi is sitting on another approximately $1.9 billion, which he says he plans to offload soon…

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Notably, buried deep in the report, Kobayashi disclosed that he’s asked US prosecutors for more information about the arrest of Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national who was charged with laundering $4 billion in stolen Mt. Gox profits through his old exchange, BTC-e.

It’s unclear whether Kobayashi is planning on trying to recover some of these funds…